Thursday, August 21, 2014

Due to popular demand, I have expanded the remit of this blog series to include people who are nearly 50. There are even more of us out there!

As before, the questions in bold come from me. Otherwise, all the words are from the interviewees themselves.

***

I am Laura, 48, female, chronically sick from Ehlers Danlos, living in the USA since February 2013, in The Netherlands before that.

I am
married to a woman, since May 2013. From 1986 till 2005 I was with a man and
had two children with him.

How did you come to think of yourself as bisexual?I have
always had crushes on boys AND girls. Sexuality in The Netherlands is not a
taboo and certainly not in my family. When I told my mother that I was seeing a
girl, my first sort-of-relationship when I was 16, it got accepted without any
word of surprise. When I got my first real relationship with a boy at 18, that
was no subject of discussion either. I don’t even remember when I started
calling it bisexuality, I do know that when I dated that girl it was not a word
I used. And it did not change for me during the years.

Has this changed over the years, and if so how?After my
first girlfriend I had a few sexual experiences with girls but after that I met
my boyfriend, later husband, and stayed with him for almost 20 years. After
that I started dating again, but by then I had a chronic illness and the
responses of the men I dated was horrifying. The last date ended with the guy
asking: “But what if I want to go out on Friday evening and you are tired?” and
that’s when I decided I’d had it with men. So I contemplated: how about dating
women. And that was quite a step. Because I knew I was interested sexually and
I knew I could fall in love, but having a relationship with a woman? And I
didn’t want to date women and then have to tell them, no sorry, I’d like a
night with you but a relationship no thanks... But I took the step and
never looked back. I met my present wife, by the way, very unconventionally,
via Farm Ville on Facebook.... She was a new neighbor, saw my pic, thought hm
ho, asked me if I needed something for FV and after the second talk we were
both hooked.

When I
was dating, many lesbians had atrocious statements on their profiles, like “if
you’re bi, don’t even bother dropping me a note, I won’t even write you back”.
The bi-hate is so big in the lesbian world. That was very very hurtful, and
still is. They try to make it sound like just one of the many preferences they
have, like preferring tall women, but it boils my blood. So lets not go there
today.What do other people in your life know about your bisexuality, and how do they react?

Here in
the US I don’t know a lot of people, and since being gay is hard enough, I
refrain from taking it one step further. When I started dating women after my
divorce though, there were people who were sort of offended that they didn’t
know that about me. Well, when I am with a man, you can’t TELL that I am
bisexual. And if the subject doesn’t come up...

Looking
back over your life so far, is there anything you wish you’d done differently?

Not in
regards to my bisexuality, no.

What
about your hopes or fears for the future (regarding bisexuality)?

I hope
that the biphobia and bi-erasure will stop, certainly from within the
LGBT-community.

Any words
of wisdom for younger bi people – or older ones?

Don’t let
others tell you what your bisexuality means for you. People like to think that
they know better, but there’s only one person who knows you best: you!

Would you like to help combat bi erasure and increase visibility of bisexuals over 50 (or thereabouts)? There are plenty of us out there but far too many people don't know that.

I am looking for other individuals who would like to contribute their "email interviews" to this blog, as Laura has done here. For more information about what to do, take a look at this post.

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Here's the second in the series of "email interviews" with bi people over 50. There has been a lot of good reaction to this on social media, so many thanks! We are out there.

Each of these "interviews" is written by the individual concerned; the questions in bold come from me.

***

I'm Jan Steckel, 51, white, female, writer and former paediatrician. I live in a house in
Oakland, California, USA, with my husband who is also bisexual.

How did you come to think of yourself as bisexual?

I’d had boyfriends since the eighth grade [aged 13] and assumed I was straight.
Then, the summer before I turned 18, I sang in a band. I was falling in
love with the lead guitarist, a man, when the drummer, a woman, asked me out. I
made out with her that night and realized that I was bisexual, even though I
ended up with the young man.

What does being bisexual mean to you?

It means I am sexually attracted to some people who are the same sex as
I am and to some who are of a different sex from me.

Has this changed over the years, and if so, how?

Not much since I realized I was bi. It’s my gender identity that has
changed instead. When I was a kid I thought I was a boy and that some mistake
had been made. In college I wished I was a man. I was pretty dysphoric about my
body’s curves, such as they were. I wanted the hard planes of a man’s body, and
I wanted to love a man as another man. Almost all the fiction I wrote then was
first person male, and my closest friends were male, too.

Now I’m comfortable with being female. As an adult, I was always more
sexually attracted to women but had a tendency to fall in love with men. Since
my recent menopause, I think I’ve become more attracted to women as well as to
trans and nonbinary people and less attracted to men, though my attraction to
my husband has remained constant.

What do other people in your life know about your bisexuality and how do
they react?

Most people who know me know that I’m bi. I’m pretty out and loud about
it, and have been for decades. Since my poetry book The Horizontal Poet won
the 2012 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction, I pretty much lead my
literary bio with that. One of my older female relatives told me angrily that
by putting the fact that I was bisexual on the back of my book, I had
disrespected my marriage to my husband, but most of my family has been pretty
cool.

When I first came out to my mother, she was worried that if I ended up
with a woman I wouldn’t have children, or my children would be screwed up. She
got over that well before I was out of my childbearing years, I think, though
in the end I didn’t have kids. My Dad was probably more uncomfortable at first
than my Mom, but he’s pretty cool about it now. My brother’s always been fine
about it.

It was definitely not cool, though, with many of my fellow physicians.
That’s part of the reason I’m not in medicine anymore. Poets and writers are a
lot more accepting.

My husband is bisexual, too, and it’s a pretty big part of our lives. We
march every year in the bi contingent of the San Francisco Pride parade, and he
hosts a social group called Berkeley BiFriendly where we met. We’ve both been
published in bisexual anthologies and periodicals. I just had a short story
come out in Best Bi Short Stories, and he has a painting being
reproduced in a forthcoming anthology of work by bi men. Many of our friends
are queer, so we get a lot of support from our community around it.

Looking back over your life so far, is there anything you wish you’d
done differently?

I wish I had dated more women early on and had longer-lasting relationships
with them. I was a little passive at first, waiting for people to pursue me
instead of taking the initiative.

What about your hopes or fears for the future (regarding bisexuality)?

I belong to an online writing critique group where some jackass keeps
attacking me every time I mention writing for bi periodicals or any honor I’ve
got for bi writing. He accuses me of playing identity politics. My answer to
that is that I’d be delighted not to need identity politics anymore. When
discrimination against bisexual people goes away, then if people don’t want to
label themselves according to their sexuality, fine. Until then I’m sticking to
my label and making sure young people see plenty of bisexual characters in
literature. I want young bisexually inclined people to see themselves reflected
in what they read. I want them to have a peer group of other bisexual people,
unlike me when I was coming up.

Any words of wisdom for younger bi people – or older ones?

Find a peer group of other bi people, even if it’s only online. Get
support from them. Try to find a safe way to come out, even if it means moving
to a city with a visible bi population.

Would you like to help combat bi erasure and increase visibility of bisexuals over 50? There are plenty of us out there but far too many people don't know that.

I am looking for other individuals who would like to contribute their "email interviews" to this blog, as Jan has done here. For more information about what to do, take a look at this post

How did you come to think
of yourself as bisexual (or whatever label/non-label you use)?

I
read an article at age 14 in a “girly” magazine, that someone had left laying
around, written by someone who was of the opinion that everyone is bisexual, and
I just thought, yes, of course, and therefore knew that I was bisexual.

What does being bisexual
(or as above) mean to you?

Being
bisexual to me means being attracted to same and different gender(s).

Has this changed over the
years, and if so how?

No,
my identification, and understanding of bisexuality has not changed.

What do other people in
your life know about your bisexuality and how do they react?

Being
a bisexual blogger, activist and an author of a bisexual themed novel means
that I’m about as out as a person can be. Reactions are of course varied.
Often, I am not directly present when a person becomes aware of my bisexuality
and so I do not see their reactions. I find that being very confident and
comfortable in my sexual identity, and presenting my sexuality in a way that
conveys that the only possible response from others is respect and acceptance,
results in usually not having negative things said to me. Occasionally, people
will make misinformed comments based on their lack of information.

When
fighting biphobia, for example as @BisexualBatman
on Twitter, I actually seek out biphobia, and the person receiving my response
usually knows nothing about me except for my tweet. In this role, I have had
many hateful and harassing responses. Happily, I do also get people apologizing
for their biphobia, or asking for more information to educate themselves.

Looking back over your
life so far, is there anything you wish you’d done differently?

From
a young age, I’ve always quite consciously tried to live in a way that would
result me being able to say I have no regrets. I can say that, though things
did not always turn out as I would have liked, I did make the best decisions
based on the realities of my life at the time.

What about your hopes or
fears for the future (regarding bisexuality)?

I
would like to see bisexuality become recognized and accepted as just another
sexual orientation, and that we reach a time when all bisexuals are comfortable
and confident with their sexual identity.

Any words of wisdom for
younger bi people – or older ones?

Recognize
that your sexuality is integral to who you are, and that accepting, embracing
and being true to yourself is a necessary component of mental health and happiness.
Do what you can to remove yourself from situations and people who cannot honor
this, and find, and reach out to, the community that does.

Would you like to help combat bi erasure and increase visibility of bisexuals over 50? There are plenty of us out there but far too many people don't know that.

I am looking for more people to contribute their "email interviews" to this blog, as Harrie has done here. For more information about what to do, take a look at this post